When your old SF novel starts coming true

It was a strange sensation to check Google News on a lovely spring morning and find a new headline: "Irreversible collapse." The collapse is of a major part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet under the steady erosion of warming sea water. Pretty dramatic, no doubt, but just another global warming story.

Unless you'd already written the story 40 years ago.

The recent reports cite a 1978 prediction by U.S. glaciologist John H. Mercer that such an event might result from global warming. But I had been inspired by a 1964 report that argued such a surge could start an ice age.

I can still recall the moment, circa 1973, when I ran across a newspaper article on that report. According to a New Zealand scientist named A. T. Wilson, sea water periodically gets under the Antarctic ice sheets and acts like a lubricant, allowing the enormous weight of the ice to surge into the Southern Ocean.

With the ocean covered by ice as far north as 55º south, sunlight would be reflected back into space and the planet would begin to cool. The ice would eventually melt, raising sea levels by some 20 metres in "100 years or much less," according to another scientist.

But the cooling would persist longer than the ice. Soon snow in the northern hemisphere would survive the summers, growing into glaciers and then into continental ice sheets.

I set to work on a science fiction thriller I titled Icequake, setting it in the distant future year of 1985. The first step was research: I found the original article by Wilson, and follow-up articles by him and others. Then I researched the history and present of the Antarctic, right down to the bearskins that the Russians used as doors in their Vostok base.